David Cameron’s recent meanderings on the desirability or not of a referendum on continuing British membership of the European Union brought to mind some lines from A Man for all Seasons. Sir Thomas More is in conversation with Will Roper, his future son-in-law;

Now listen well. Two years ago you were a passionate churchman. Now you’re a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning your face is to the front again.

Two years? My goodness; how slow Roper’s revolutions are compared with those of our dear Prime Minister. His head can turn a full cycle in as many days! Last week he announced that he was opposed to an EU referendum. It was not the right thing to do, he said after the latest Brussels summit to patch and repair the euro. Now it seems it is the right thing to do, at least it was on Sunday. It would be hasty to make any predictions here, not when Cameron’s head is still spinning.

It seems that Thursday Cameron misrepresented the views of Sunday Cameron. The man who was Thursday said no; the man who is Sunday said possibly…when the time is right. I’m guessing that the time will never be right, that Sunday man is trying to hold off the Tory right. One hundred of the party’s MPs wrote to the Prime Minister, calling him to legislate for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU in the near future.

Quick; cue a new u-turn. Sunday’s child is full of grace! Britain, the PM wrote today in the Sunday Telegraph, is in danger of getting swamped by EU legislation and bureaucracy. In danger?! One would almost think he knew nothing of this country, of our present political realities; that he had taken to wandering aimlessly across the world, hither and thither, like the ghastly Tony Blair.

I’m being ungracious. For the moment Cameron’s head is in the right place. For the moment he believes that the two words ‘Europe’ and ‘referendum’ can go together. In that respect they are a bit like love and marriage – they go together like a horse and carriage. Cameron’s spin comes, I suspect, because of the fox in the thicket. Yes Fantastic Mister Fox in the shape of Dr Liam, the former Defence Secretary, who is preparing to tell Tory activists that life outside the EU holds no terror.

I applaud his good sense, though I think he is being far too coy. It’s life inside the EU that’s full of terror, one unpleasant surprise hard upon another unwelcome development. Inside our parliamentary democracy will get weaker and weaker, until the point where Westminster will have all the glory of a benighted county council. Oops, I better watch my step in case some eurorat bureaucrat steps this way. Life has become better, comrade. Life has become merrier!

I’ll certainly be merry if a referendum is ever called. I will vote with as much delight as I did in last year’s AV bash, a nail in the coffin of the Liberal Democrats, a parry for whom I now entertain a special loathing. But will it come? I shall have to ask the man who was Thursday.

I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face — an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.

Impressed as I am by him as a politician I never quite saw David Cameron in the role of Hercules. OK, he might not be ready to fight lions – not yet – but he is about to embark on the fifth labour of the Greek hero: he is about to cleanse the Augean Stables; he is about to clean the accumulated filth of thirteen years of Labour elf ‘n’ safety rules, laws and mind-numbingly petty regulations.

In an interview with the Daily Mail on Saturday, Super Dave said that this whole area had gone mad under the previous government, that the time has come to end the accumulated neurosis which has forced the emergency services to stand aside while people, including children, have died, for fear of contravening some regulation or other, for fear of incurring the wrath of some jobsworth or other.

As an aside to the interview some examples are given. Two of them for me define the parameters of the whole elf ‘n’ safety farce, one sad, the other laughable.

In Wigan police support officers watched ten-year-old Jordan Lyon struggling in a pond, ordered not to intervene by their control room because they did not have the right training. By the time those with such training arrived Jordan was dead.

After an inquiry lasting two years and costing £250,000, elf ‘n’ safety inspectors concluded that ten-pin bowling alleys could be a “very dangerous” environment for families. Why? Had they been the setting for some serious accidents? No, they had not. It was too easy, the dramatic conclusion was reached, for children or teenagers to run down the lanes and become trapped in the machinery. After a second’s reflection, at no cost at all, I can tell you that life leads to death. Only elf ‘n’ safety inspectors stand in the way!

Anyway, returning to Dave, he commissioned Lord Young, Margaret Thatcher’s one-time Trade and Industry Secretary, to look into this whole area. Young is to recommend that the police, paramedics, ambulance drivers and other emergency services be exempt from prosecution under elf ‘n’ safety laws while carrying out their duties.

The Prime Minister said, commenting on Young’s work, that there was far too much intrusion into everyday life by state-sanctioned bureaucracy, bureaucracy that now makes something as simple as a school outing all but impossible. He has not ruled out abolishing that dreadful quango the Health and Safety Executive altogether.

“We do have a good record of health and safety at work in this country”, he said, “”and we have a low level of industrial accidents and that’s important. You can deal with this problem without jeopardising that at all. The neurosis comes from excessive litigation fears, unclear law, mission creep, Europe, town halls. It’s all of those things and we have to deal with each one. That’s what we will do.”

Well done, Hercules. Now it’s time to move on to those wretched Stympahlian Birds.